Death and Glory
 by Dan - Cape Town
 
 Where is the glory in it all ?,
 when your soul rides choking diesel fumes
 and your funeral pyre
 is fuelled by molten metal and a burning rubber plume,
 when you scream at the searing injustice
 of being roasted alive
 and all you wanted to do is live.
 Too late, you're dead.
 And then your tank explodes and burns
 and you with it.
 
 The tortured metal hulk will cool
 and slowly turn to rust
 and your charred remains
 will fall to dust
 and feed the flowers and the trees
 which give life
 to a small red butterfly,
 bouncing on the gentle breeze
  - that's where the glory lies,
  
     

  To an Infantry Corporal home from the war
     (For CJL)
    by Karen Batley
      
  Today you showed me your 
  Border boots,
  so small and neat
  I marvelled at the tracts
  they had known,
  the hot patrols
  they had covered.
  And then you showed me 
  your name
  carved into the soles
  to imprint your mark in the sand,
  as if bravely to say
  'I am here.
  I will leave evidence of me
  in this other country'.

  And you did.

  For I know that your soul,
  Carved with the essence of you,
  has stayed behind
  to sing free across the desert;
  has joined forever
  a myriad other half-souls,
  friends,
  whose battalions of names
  the wind
  long ago
  erased
  from the shifting sand.

  And you direct still
  your silent brown platoon
  to march in memory
  beneath the bright stars
  of another time, 
  another land.


-Copyright 1996 Karen Batley-


******* On The Border *******

One day I began a relationship with a fellow being on the Border - a
South West desert gecko. She ws pure white with scales on her body.
Later I realized that she was pregnant - that's how I knew she was
female. She was my best friend on the Border. She was tiny when I
found her amongst my tent bags on the ground, but she soon grew
large. I tamed her by stroking her head and    body. Anyone else would
have found   her hideous so I kept her absolutely secret.

And then one evening, just before I returned to the States (that is South
Africa), I came upon her in front of the Ops Room, where she lay
pregnant and dying  near my tent. It broke me more than all the death I
had seen in the war. I will never forget it - it will never leave me. I kept
her warm in my bed, and the next day I buried the ugly swollen creature
next to my tent. I think a bit of my soul went into the grave with her.

by a soldier of South Africa